30 shards: Kagome
by Lalieth
Summary: Series of 30 mostly drabble-sized writings for the 30shards LJ community. They focus on Kagome. Many different pairing and different portrayals of Kagome will show up.
1. Courage

Courage, Withered

By Lalieth

Many times she found herself lost in thought as she let the cool metal glide across the thin, delicate skin of her wrist. When this happened she would lift the thin blade to her cheek, relishing in the sensation of the cold metal, and think: was I wrong, am I wrong?

Use and old age had led her to accept her cowardice. Trapped in a world of her own making, consumed by the chill of her martyred youth and wasted fertility, Kagome aged in a yellowed dust of memories and solitude. She laughed sometimes, a cold and hollow sound, when she remembered her old passions, those ridiculous dramas and consuming affairs with demons, half-demons, little boys.

Yes, the despicable coward was dead, that was true, wiped from the face of the earth forever. She was sure he would not get a second chance. But somehow that seemed to matter little. For no others now lived who even recalled his malice. Well, that was not exactly true—there were two others who perhaps could remember. But Sango had been driven insensible by the burden of her conscience and in the end had reached old age in a state of total innocence. Kagome inwardly cursed her cowardice that she could not pick up the knife and end it for good for Sango whom, every evening, prepared a fine supper and waited in the yard for hours for her family and friends to arrive. She was exhausted from the constant vigilance required to keep her old friend in peaceful habits and from wandering into the wild looking for a ten-year-old boy.

And then there was the _other_. Most had forgotten about the undead miko, so completely buried alive in a hut on the extreme edge of the village. But right up to the day that the woman's second funeral procession passed by her door Kagome had not failed to recall her old rival rotting in her wormhole for a single moment. When she looked at the pyre she thought Kikyou must have finally sent the soul-collectors away, that Kikyou had done what she could not. She wondered why the miko had waited so long. When she saw Inuyasha standing under The Tree looking much older than when he'd died, she understood he was waiting for Kikyou. Then the last rose-colored spot in her heart, that by now was no bigger than a thumbprint, turned to ash. She wished she had her own soul-collectors to send away. She was sure she would have enough courage to do that. Perhaps not the knife, but she could do that.


	2. Rain

When it Rains it Pours

By Lalieth

Kagome had not yet come upon the wisdom to develop a keen sense of self. She would often be swept away beyond even her own knowledge. On more than one occasion she had found herself in circumstances that she had unknowingly created. Each time, she would inwardly curse her foolishness and make a solemn vow that she would continue working on self-possession.

The last such incident occurred like all the rest, like a sudden and unexpected cloudburst. She was traveling with her friends in their interminable search for the deadliest foe. As had occurred on many occasions they had stopped to seek lodgings in a hospitable village. Normally, a field or grove would be good enough, but it had been raining steadily for several days and Kagome felt as though she would never be dry again.

That night, Kagome and Inuyasha squabbled about some stupid detail that neither of them really cared about. Kagome cared for Inuyasha and knew he cared for her. Still, she could not shake the feeling that fights had their way with the two of them, rather than the reverse.

She was stalking her way to the bedroom she shared with Shippou when she passed Miroku in the hallway. He smiled at her warmly and when they passed, she was obliged to turn sideways to give him room. He turned slightly and the two brushed against each other briefly. The moment clutched Kagome's heart like a fist of ice, however, and seemed endless. She blushed furiously, followed quickly by a heated anger turned inward like a knife.

That night Kagome could not sleep for one moment because of the sting of solitary, of an itch she could not get to. She wondered if the event was foreseeable. She tried to isolate the movement that could have ignited this spark. She could think of no accessible answers or reliable logic however, only mumbling in her fitful dozing, "When it rains, it pours".

A few days later, a similar catastrophe occurred. They had stopped to rest in the pleasant shade of a spreading oak. Miroku impulsively handed her a buttercup that he found growing beside a root in spite of the recent frost. No one else saw the gesture, or her blush, for which she was exceedingly grateful. It seemed to mean nothing to him more than a simple gift to a friend. She prayed fervently that she would be able to avoid him in the future.

Unfortunately, she underestimated the incredible need created by solitude. Sure enough, she found herself alone with him in another room in another town. A town that must have been at the edge of the world, she thought, because reality and time slipped away.

In that most clandestine of places, created by coincidence and the preoccupation of others, Kagome just gave in. She surrendered her ridiculous sense of self, her armies of self-recrimination, her solitude of a martyred love. In the end she gave herself without ceremony, without any shyness, and with such a fluid intuition that another man might have confused it with experience. But Miroku knew it to be no gift to him at all, only the expelling of an unbearable burden of anxiety and of hate. A small part of him felt some culpability that one burden would replace another, but since it was true for him also, he quickly repressed it.

It could not be said that it was a moment of salvation, at least not a lasting one. When Inuyasha and the others came back to the house they were surprised to find her standing in the open rain, making no effort to seek shelter. She was surrounded by an impenetrable mist of inscrutability and was mentally choosing her confessions and discounting excuses. She did not answer their questions but simply turned her face skyward, thinking that it may cleanse the burning liquid left behind in the pit of her sex. It may even cleanse the remorse of conscience.


	3. Magic

Birthday Prediction

by Lalieth

Kagome underwent an enormous effort to celebrate her twentieth birthday with her family. She had to persuade Inuyasha to travel back to Edo in time and to wait for her for a couple of days. It took a lot of convincing. Years had passed and still the unrelenting cycles of Naraku's maliciousness went unabated. That aside, however, Kagome felt she still owed her family something. She had disappointed them in so many ways that she felt an oppressive burden of compunction whenever she was in their company.

The celebration was marked with a merry vitality, though Kagome could not free herself from the notion that it was all affected and unnatural. Her family seemed pleased that she had made an effort to be dutiful, but in the end it was her own frustrated party, because her conscience remained uneased.

She also indulged in a brief celebration with her old friends from school, from her old life. They also tried to recreate the picture of normalcy, to follow the median of people their age, in their stage of life. But Kagome was not really any of these things and they all knew it, even as they spooned down frozen yogurt in a nimbus of silence. At least, Kagome thought they all knew it.

They had decided to go the fair, which just so happened to be to the south of Tokyo this time of year. They rode rides, ate horrible food, lost money playing ridiculous games, and petted the languid livestock. For a few moments, Kagome thought she had succeeded in shaking off the shell of that _otherness_ business, like a beetle emerging from the old skeleton. But then Yuka suddenly pulled her into a garishly decorated tent with furs on the floor and beads hanging from the ceiling like seeds on strings.

An old woman sat in front of a cheap, folding table. She was the archetype of fortune-tellers, having obviously chosen each artifact of her farcical appearance very carefully.

"Come on," Yuka pushed her into a chair, "it'll be fun."

Before she knew what was going on, the woman grabbed her right hand and held it for only a few seconds. Then she began laying cards upon the table in some inscrutable pattern with an air of cool competence. She examined the finished product however for at least five minutes before she would look up. She regarded the young, normal looking woman in front of her with an enigmatic air of regret.

"You will not be happy," she said with conviction, "so long as your feet remain pointed backwards."

Kagome shuddered to hear the prison sentence so decisively announced. It only served to increase her feeling of unease that she was truly unsure whose fate she was hearing. Was it really hers? Was it that of her friends? It could even belong to Kikyou.

Her friends later laughed about the prediction, saying that it was conveniently vague and that the old woman was such a pathetic and obvious hoax. A _counterfeit_, they said, and Kagome shuddered again. She said nothing, but she knew that the old woman's magic was real; at least her faculty for prophecy was real, though she could not imagine how she had come by it. The frustrated party had rendered a vicious gift, a revelation that Kagome felt was dragging her toward her ultimate end. She saw with a clarity of surrender that it did not really matter which way her feet were pointed. It did not matter if she was in the Sengoku jidai or in the modern era. It did not matter because the magic of her own soul—so heavy, pure, and tainted all at once, was always with her. So she was always the same Kagome, imprisoned in her own ineluctable fate.


	4. Lies

Little Lies

By Lalieth

Kagome would watch the heartless games her friends played with each other, on each other, once they got to high school; and she would actually smile to herself a sagely little smile. She would imagine to herself that she had been elevated above those things—because she had to be. Kagome did not have time to bat her eyelashes winsomely, or sigh and heave her bosom wistfully. She was too busy slaying demons, patching wounds, and becoming the great miko who would—in the past—kick Naraku's ass, eventually. So, Kagome was above those things.

Kagome was a liar.

Her own heart's disappointment had left her much crueler than she would ever admit, or even recognize. Indeed, she would not have recognized herself at all, if she had really been paying attention. But because she relied on other people's image of herself and because she was such a perfect liar—she was completely in the dark.

So it was that she did not realize the contempt she now felt for Inuyasha and Kouga when they squabbled over her affections; or even for Ginta and Hakkaku when the called her "little sister". _I am not from your tribe_, she would think, and then without realizing it she would relish in her own small and mean secrets.

When her friends back home asked how she got by without any "romantic entertainment" and inquired if she were seeking comfort from a cold, man-made appliance she would just laugh and wave them off and say: "Don't be silly, you know I don't think of those things." Because she was, after all, above all that.

She was a liar.

But she did not think of any of those things, not her classmates and their schemes or the wolf demons and their idiotic adulation, when she laid perfectly still pretending to be asleep as her little lie snuck out of the hut before dawn.

It should be emphasized at this point that Kagome was not at all a_ terrible _person. When one examines the past few years of her life and uncovers the horrendous mess it had become, it should be clearly understood from where her capacity for duplicity developed. After all, she was leading a double life as though it was perfectly normal, and just about everyone dear to her was wholly aware of the lie and they also accepted it as perfectly normal, for the most part. Hence, it was not long before Kagome would come to blur the line between what is the truth, and what everyone thinks.

And so her purity became the same lie as her school uniform, the chastity the same lie as her excuses, her performance, her future. It was something she tucked under her pillow when the little lie crept into the dark and laid down beside her.

"It's okay that I'm leading this bizarre, secret life," she used to say to herself, "as long as no one knows about it. As long as no one knows I'm his girl."

Kagome rolled over under the covers and tugged at a red string and loosened the opening of a kimono. She mumbled a few phrases along the lines of "I'm glad you came" and "yes, I know, it hurts me too."

Awful, soul-shuddering lies.

"It's okay that I'm leading this bizarre, double life," she said to herself now, "as long as nobody knows I'm her friend. As long as nobody knows I'm her man."

The smell was so similar to her own that it was easily absorbed into her and Inuyasha never noticed it on her hands, in her hair, or between her thighs the next morning. No, only Kagome knew about all those little lies.

One evening however, an incidental event shattered her little delusions once and for all. Shippou was older now but still a child and one evening something somewhere must have frightened him and he bolted into Kagome's hut where she supposedly slept alone. Her companion was able to hide and the kitsune apparently never noticed the other presence. Kagome tried to comfort him sincerely and even gave him a piece of dark chocolate before sending him back to his own bed.

That episode shocked Kagome out of her delirium. She realized that she had gone too far, that she was no longer playing kissing games with a willing companion in the dark, someone who just needed a little attention. She was floundering about in a languid passion, one that was dangerous and had no future. Worse, she had come too close to risking the exposure of the lies she depended on to keep herself together. Not the little lie that laid in her bed, but the other, bigger and more important ones that wrapped her heart in an impenetrable and organdy cloth. So she cut if off with one stroke, literally.

Hours before dawn, she had convinced herself that what she was about to do was for the good of everyone, that it was selfless. She waited until the companion had sought her out and now stood standing very close, peering at her sharply, trying to discern what made her tick but unable to pierce through that cloth. Kagome took a deep breath, and then, drew it in.

The little lie let out a little gasp. "Kagome—wait, why? Kagome! You couldn't!"

"I am sorry, but this really is for the best, for your own good," she lied, "I hate to let you go, but it's time to say goodbye now, and I'm going to need that back."

She watched as the face that had once been hot against her own seemed to lose its color and fade like old paper. She watched ghostly fingers reach out for her in mute supplication and remembered when they had searched across her stomach like cold, anxious little caterpillars, full of fear and little lies, until they dove into the very nest of her own anxiety.

She smiled warmly at the fading apparition with genuine affection. "Poor Kikyou," she said lovingly, "you've walked in this shadowed half-life for too long. It was selfish of me not to do this sooner. Be at peace." With that, she pushed the form that was now nearly transparent with weakness right over the cliff.

Cliffs could be so convenient.

She had done the right thing. She was not cruel or heartless. She was not deceitful and was certainly not the lover of an undead, female, predecessor. She was not alone in this pitiful darkness. She was the miko, Inuyasha's companion and Naraku's enemy. She was a schoolgirl. She was a daughter and a sister. She was a sister of the wolf demon tribes. She was Kagome. She was Kagome. She was Kagome…she was Kagome…she was…


	5. Revenge

Revolving

By Lalieth

The very moment of Naraku's death and in the very still instant after, Kagome started to hold her breath.

What would he do?

Unfortunately, despite the happiness he had known in the company of Kagome, Inuyasha was apparently unable to give up the past. He was as incapable of doing so as his late enemy had been and as his undead "wife" was still.

No one knew how he had convinced Kikyou to remain in her shadowed existence, but they did not descend into hell. Rather, they withdrew themselves apart and took up a lonely existence in the wild. Some whispered that Inuyasha was not wholly willing to give up his ties to the mortal earth, even if it were for his long lost love. And Kagome waited.

She showed no signs of worry. She had made a man of him. While he was still cocooned in his childish solitude, his head full of the dream of himself made by others, she alone had drawn him out and given him a place in the world. Nature had made him aggressively isolated and self-centered, and she had molded an opposite character in him, one that was actually open, expansive and grateful. Kagome had given Inuyasha a palpable joy of living and converted him from hot anger to warm passion.

And then he left, as all sons leave the nest sooner or later.

Inuyasha sincerely felt that it was the only right thing to do. He believed that, with Kikyou, he could find the peaceful repose he had known before Naraku had shattered everything. But the most truthful reason was that he could not bear to retreat, to do anything other than what he said he would do, so long ago. He'd sooner die than have others say of him that he was faithless, or even wishy-washy. Inuyasha had made the decision before the death of his enemy. Kagome knew she would have to be more patient than she had expected because he seemed ready to sacrifice himself for appearances and conscience. To those who pitied her fate she simply said: "Don't worry, some other mikos run errands for me."

And it so happened that Inuyasha did return. He wondered into her hut on a languid June night almost as soon as the "honeymoon" was over. Now Inuyasha was no longer certain which past he was unable to give up and at one in the morning Kagome received him in bed, without the slightest prick of conscience. She was still young but could see straight away that Kikyou could not change her cold and ashy nature, and she relished the taste of the sweetest vengeance. It was so sweet and secret that she did not mind sending him back the next day, just as somewhere Kikyou, who sustained herself on her own private sense of fulfilled vengeance, pretended to not know where he went. Thus is was that they all convinced themselves that they were truly the ones who had come out on top in the situation and that, all things considered, they should really be grateful.


End file.
